Get the latest tech news
Binary Distribution Rebuilds
I rebuilt (the top-50 popcon) Debian and Ubuntu packages, on amd and arm64, and compared the results a couple of months ago. Since then the Reproduce.Debian.net effort has been launched.
I fear attempting to do so ultimately leads to a need to rebuild 20+ year old packages, with a non-negligible amount of them being illegal to distribute or are unable to build anymore due to bit-rot. I already showed that stage #0 was around ~30% reproducible compared to the official binaries, but I didn’t save the artifacts in a reusable repository. I believe the ultimate end goal of Idempotent Rebuilds is to be able to re-bootstrap a binary distribution like Debian from some other bootstrappable environment like Guix.
Or read this on Hacker News